Islamic silver dirhams flow north through Rus trade routes
Cut coins from Samarkand end up buried in Scandinavian farmland
Quick facts
- Coin type
- Islamic silver dirhams
- Mint cities
- Samarkand, Tashkent
- Trade route
- Volga and Don rivers via Rus middlemen
- Shift away from dirhams
- End of the 900s CE
What happened
Through the ninth and tenth centuries, silver coins called dirhams, minted in cities such as Samarkand and Tashkent in Muslim Central Asia, traveled north along the Volga and Don river routes to reach Scandinavia in large quantities. Muslim merchants on those rivers traded the coins for furs, slaves, honey, and wax brought by Rus traders, and the Danish trading town of Hedeby connected onward via Birka and Gotland to these eastern routes and to Constantinople and Baghdad. The silver was not used as counted currency the way a modern coin is; the Vikings treated it as bullion, cutting pieces off to pay the exact weight owed, which is why hoards contain fragments alongside whole coins. Around the end of the 900s the flow of Arab dirhams dried up as the Central Asian mines were exhausted, and Viking traders shifted to silver from mines in the Harz Mountains of Central Europe instead.
Why it matters
The dirham hoards found across Scandinavia are physical proof of a trade network stretching from the Islamic Caliphate to the Baltic, run largely through Rus middlemen, centuries before any land route offered comparable reach. The switch to European silver at the end of the 900s marks a real shift in the geography of Viking Age trade, not just a change in coin design.
How we know
The National Museum of Denmark's research on Viking Age silver hoards traces the geographic origin of the coins through their mint marks and Arabic inscriptions, and identifies the trade routes and the timing of the silver source shift.
Sources
- National Museum of Denmark. Silver's route to Denmark, trading with the Arab coins · Reputable sourceen.natmus.dk · The domain "en.natmus.dk" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- National Museum of Denmark. The silver hoards of the Vikings · Reputable sourceen.natmus.dk · The domain "en.natmus.dk" is on our Reputable source registry.
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